Chapter 1: Just Because You Have Feathers ...
There are probably dozens of well-intended
people who have advice for how you should live your life, make your
career choices, or make yourself happy. Similarly, walk into the
self-help section of any bookstore and you’ll be overwhelmed with scores
of choices about how you can improve your life. You know, intuitively,
that all these books can’t be right. But how can you tell them apart?
How do you know what is good advice—and what is bad?
The Difference Between What to Think and How to Think
There are no easy answers to life's challenge. The quest to find happiness and meaning in life is not new. What is new, however is how some modern thinkers address the problem. What I want from this book is not to give you quick fixes for the fundamental problem of this life. But I can offer you tools or theories to help you make good choices in your life.
I learned the power of this approach in several occasion. In 1997, I met Andy Grove, then the chairman of Intel and he told me, "Look, we only have ten minutes for you, tell us how your theory can help Intel." I responded, "Andy, I can't because I don't know anything about Intel. The only thing I can do is to explain the theory first and we then we can look at Intel."
I then showed him a diagram of my theory of disruption. Disruption happens when a competitor enters a market with low-priced product or service that most established industry players view as inferior. But the new competitor uses technology and its business model to
continually improve its offering until it is good enough to satisfy what
customers need.
I told the story of the steel-mill industry, in which Nucor and other
steel mini-mills disrupted the integrated steel-mill giants. The
mini-mills began by attacking at the lowest end of the market—steel
reinforcing bar, or rebar—and then step by step moved up toward the high end, to make sheet steel—eventually driving all but one of the traditional steel mills into bankruptcy. From there, Andy managed to articulate what would become of Intel's strategy to launch the lower-priced Celeron processor.
I didn't tell him what to think, but how to think. He then reached a bold decision about what to do, on his own.
I Don't Have an Opinion, The Theory Has an Opinion
A year after the meeting with Andy, I got a call from William
Cohen, then–secretary of defense in the Clinton administration. “Could you come to Washington and talk to me and my staff about your
research?” he asked. To me, this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. When I got there, Secretary Cohen simply asked me to present my
research. So using the exact same PowerPoint slides I had used with Andy
Grove, I started explaining the theory of disruption.
As soon as I had
explained how the mini-mills had undermined the traditional steel
industry by starting with rebar at the bottom, General Hugh Shelton,
then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stopped me. “You have no
idea why we are interested in this, do you?” he queried. Then he
gestured to the mini-mill chart. “You see the sheet steel products at
the top of the market?” he asked. “That was the Soviets, and they’re not
the enemy anymore.” Then he pointed to the bottom of the
market—rebar—and said, “The rebar of our world is local policing actions
and terrorism.”
Just as the mini-mills had attacked the massive
integrated mills at the bottom of the market and then moved up, he
worried aloud, “Everything about the way we do our jobs is focused on
the high end of the problem—what the USSR used to be.”
On the surface, competition in the computer chip
market and the proliferation of global terrorism could not seem like
more different problems to tackle. But they are fundamentally the same
problem, just in different contexts. Good theory can help us categorize,
explain, and, most important, predict.
People often think that the best way to predict the
future is by collecting as much data as possible before making a
decision. But this is like driving a car looking only at the rearview
mirror—because data is only available about the past.
Indeed, while experiences and information can be
good teachers, there are many times in life where we simply cannot
afford to learn on the job. You don’t want to have to go through
multiple marriages to learn how to be a good spouse. Or wait until your
last child has grown to master parenthood. This is why theory can be so
valuable: it can explain what will happen, even before you experience
it.
Consider, for example, the history of mankind’s
attempts to fly. Early researchers observed strong correlations between
being able to fly and having feathers and wings. Stories of men
attempting to fly by strapping on wings date back hundreds of years.
They were replicating what they believed allowed birds to soar: wings
and feathers.
Possessing these attributes had a high correlation—a
connection between two things—with the ability to fly, but when humans
attempted to follow what they believed were “best practices” of the most
successful fliers by strapping on wings, then jumping off cathedrals
and flapping hard … they failed. The mistake was that although feathers
and wings were correlated with flying, the would-be aviators did not understand the fundamental causal mechanism—what actually causes something to happen—that enabled certain creatures to fly.
The real breakthrough in human flight didn’t come
from crafting better wings or using more feathers. It was brought about
by Dutch-Swiss mathematician Daniel Bernoulli and his book Hydrodynamica,
a study of fluid mechanics. In 1738, he outlined what was to become
known as Bernoulli’s principle, a theory that, when applied to flight,
explained the concept of lift. We had gone from correlation (wings and
feathers) to causality (lift). Modern flight can be traced directly back
to the development and adoption of this theory.
But even the breakthrough understanding of the cause of flight still wasn’t enough to make flight perfectly reliable.
When an airplane crashed, researchers then had to ask, “What was it
about the circumstances of that particular attempt to fly that led to
failure? Wind? Fog? The angle of the aircraft?” Researchers could then
define what rules pilots needed to follow in order to succeed in each
different circumstance. That’s a hallmark of good theory: it dispenses
its advice in “if-then” statements.
The Power of Theory in Our Lives
The appeal of easy answers—of strapping on wings and
feathers—is incredibly alluring. Whether these answers come from
writers who are hawking guaranteed steps for making millions, or
the four things you have to do to be happy in marriage, we want to
believe they will work. But so much of what’s become popular thinking
isn’t grounded in anything more than a series of anecdotes. Solving the
challenges in your life requires a deep understanding of what causes
what to happen. The theories that I will discuss with you will help you
do exactly that.
This book uses research done at the Harvard
Business School and in some of the world’s other leading universities.
It has been rigorously tested in organizations of all sizes around the
world.
Just as these theories have explained behavior in a
wide range of circumstances, so, too, do they apply across a wide range
of questions. With most complex problems it’s rarely as simple as
identifying the one and only theory that helps solve the problem. There
can be multiple theories that provide insight. For example, though
Bernoulli’s thinking was a significant breakthrough, it took other
work—such as understanding gravity and resistance—to fully explain flight.
You might be tempted to try to make decisions
in your life based on what you know has happened in the past or what
has happened to other people. You should learn all that you can from the
past; from scholars who have studied it, and from people who have gone
through problems of the sort that you are likely to face. But this
doesn’t solve the fundamental challenge of what information and what
advice you should accept, and which you should ignore as you embark into
the future. Instead, using robust theory to predict what will happen
has a much greater chance of success. The theories in this book are
based on a deep understanding of human endeavor—what causes what to
happen, and why. They’ve been rigorously examined and used in
organizations all over the globe, and can help all of us with decisions
that we make every day in our lives, too.
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